Terraform all the things

Presented by:

Nathan Handler has been contributing to the open source community for nearly 10 years, primarily through his roles as an Ubuntu and Debian developer. He is currently working as a site reliability engineer on the operations team at Yelp.

No video of the event yet, sorry!

Many companies continue to manually create and manage their cloud infrastructure via web consoles. Documenting these procedures is challenging, especially since the interfaces are always evolving. Reviewing the changes is also difficult and often involves having a coworker watching over your shoulder. Rolling back a bad change requires deleting your current work and attempting to manually recreate the old infrastructure from memory. (Scaling or deploying the infrastructure to new environments also often involves manually recreating it.)

Hashicorp’s Terraform allows for the management of infrastructure as code. While a growing number of groups have started to utilize this tool, most are only just beginning to scratch the surface of its potential. Yes, Terraform can be used to create and manage resources in AWS and other cloud providers. However, thanks to an ever-growing number of providers, it can manage resources in many other popular cloud services.

In this talk, attendees will learn:

How a large technology company transitioned from manually provisioning servers to using Terraform to manage cloud resources as reviewable and documentable code stored in a Version Control System

Some easy and actionable tips to aid in managing Terraform as the number of resources and users grows

Why it makes sense to manage all of your cloud resources in Terraform and not just your servers

Attendees to this talk should have at least a basic familiarity with what Terraform is and how it is used to manage simple resources.